In recent years there has been tremendous growth in the number of applications for mobile devices. According to at least one source, app usage increased by 76% in 2014 alone. Application categories include shopping, productivity, utilities, messaging, games, etc. Unlike restrictive platforms, such as vehicles that have a software infrastructure that is more tightly controlled, the plethora of apps that are available for mobile devices suffers from a lack of meaningful quality control.
Users of mobile devices are generally more interested about the features that the app provides and may not be concerned or even aware of the efficiency of the app. For example, some apps may be very resource heavy or simply poorly written, contributing to heavy resource usage, such as memory, processing power, battery, bandwidth, etc., ultimately leading to a quick depletion of the battery or even early degradation of the mobile device. In some instances, the mobile device may appear sluggish and/or run at an elevated temperature. Another common consequence is the need for frequent charging.
Users experiencing such issues on their mobile device typically do not fault a particular app; rather, they attribute fault to the mobile device itself. Consequently, many of the mobile devices are returned because they are deemed to be defective or of poor quality. In at least one study, over 63% of returned mobile devices are found to have no fault, which costs the global industry $4.5 billion in replacement, refurbishment, and shipping costs.
While mobile device health monitoring applications exist, they generally evaluate all the harvested performance indicators at a remote server, which is time consuming and computing/network resources intensive.